Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Thursday February 21, 2008 @09:44AM
from the hope-your-foil-hat-was-on-snug dept.

Readers of Slashdot last valentines day will remember discussing US Plans to Shoot down a damaged spy satellite. An anonymous reader noted that the US is
reporting success last night, thus saving us from hydrazine exposure. Of course this makes me wonder- if it's this easy, wouldn't an international super power war pretty much immediately mean the downing of every satellite in orbit?

If it was just about the hydrazine exposure risk, why didn't we just outsource the job to China and get it done for bottom dollar? Hell, under certain circumstances they'd probably have done it for free!

I am not a rocket scientist and neither are you, but I have been told by a satellite guy that the hydrazine has to last for the entire duration of the satellite's mission, and so the tank is extremely well insulated.

A satellite guy told me the same thing. I think he worked for DirecTV.

It wasn't an anti-satellite missile. It was an anti-missile missile, and it only worked because of the decayed orbit of the satellite. This missile would not be able to touch a "working" satellite.

I read a really funny line on DailyKos yesterday about this:

The US Navy announced that due to bad weather, it will postpone the attempt to shoot down the impaired satellite until tomorrow at the earliest. Our zillion dollar "star wars" technology is clearly capable of stopping incoming missiles so long as: they come one at a time, are the size of a school bus, travel in orbits that have been calculated for months, don't deploy any decoys, and the weather is clear.

Leave it to the Protocols of the Elders of Slashdot to put a negative spin on even this story.

OK, you want conspiracy?

Well, what *I* heard from my brother in law who knows a guy who reads the web site called thegovernmentislyingtoyou.org is that they are shooting down the spy satellite as a warning to the Space Station. It's basically NASA saying "We brought you into this world, and we can take you out of it."

The astronauts will be taken from the Atlantis and flown directly to the Vatican (the *real* Vatican hidden under the Antarctic ice pack) where they must restate their loyalty oaths to the New World Order, or face prolonged sentences in pain amplification devices at Gitmo. Those patches on the spacesuits are actually agonizers.

Seems those guys up there, especially when there's Russians on board, have been having whispered conversations (picked up by secret microphones placed on the ISS by the NSA, the DEA, the NRO, the Department of the Interior and the National Endowment for the Arts) involving phrases like "independent colony" and "breakaway republic in orbit" and similar subversive things.

Oh, and according to enterprisemission.com, smokingscalarweapon.com and the Facebook page of a former alien abductee, the window for shooting down USA 193 is defined by the eclipsed moon passing through the seventh house of Jupiter, and the alignment of Mars with a portion of the sky identified in ancient Vedic texts describing a nuclear war in India in 14,000 B.C.